Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign that Changed America (82 page)

Over the years Corbin drifted in and out of labor politics, working for both the AFL and the CIO,
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and was beaten up more than once by labor goons.
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At various times he worked for the Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union and the Furniture Workers. He was listed in FBI documents as a “union organizer” for United Public Workers, but then abruptly showed up in Baton Rouge at the headquarters of the Marine Corps League, attempting to “take over and step up the operations of that office.” He succeeded and was, for a time, the national chief of staff for the league.
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Allegations surfaced repeatedly that Corbin had Communist connections. A confidential informant in his FBI file stated that he was “a member of the Rockford [Illinois] branch of the Communist Party and active in the infiltration of labor unions.”
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Other FBI entries noted that Corbin “was a subscriber to the
Daily Worker
,” the publication of the Communist Party USA,
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and “was in frequent contact with Communist Party officials in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, during 1946.”
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An informant told the FBI in 1946 that Corbin was a card-carrying member of the “Communist Party, (registration card number 62908) made out in the name of PAUL CORBIN.” Informants confirmed Corbin's membership in 1947 and 1948.
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In 1950, however, another informer told the FBI that “in his opinion, CORBIN may be a Socialist but he [redacted] did not think CORBIN was a Communist.”
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Eventually Corbin himself told the G-men that he had “never been a member of the Communist Party and that he did not agree with the Communists.”
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Despite the conflicting reports, Corbin's old friend Adam Walinsky had no doubt about Corbin's allegiances. “He was a real Commie,” Walinsky said matter-of-factly in an interview decades later. “He got thrown out of the United Auto Workers by Walter Reuther.”
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A passionate liberal who served as a top aide to RFK in the 1960s, Walinsky was respected on both sides of the aisle for his integrity and acumen.

In this case, the FBI files confirm his assessment: the bureau secured copies of Corbin's Communist Party membership card.
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Remarkably, at the very time when Corbin was under constant FBI surveillance and being investigated by the House Committee on Un-American Activities for suspected Communist ties, he was doing brisk though surreptitious business with the biggest anti-Communist headline seeker in America: Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin.

McCarthy was barnstorming the Midwest in the early 1950s, gaining steam in his hunt for suspected Communists in the U.S. government. Typically, he would
go into a small town and give fiery speeches in legion halls, Grange halls, Masonic halls, or just on the front steps of the county courthouse. The towns were often sleepy affairs, thought “Reds” were everywhere, and wanted to be there when their hero, McCarthy, eviscerated the “fifth column” inside the U.S. government.

Before McCarthy arrived in said town, Corbin would have been there with a truck filled with American flags to sell to the locals—big American flags, little American flags, American flags with gold trim. No one wanted to go see “Tail Gunner Joe” without an American flag to wave. Corbin cleaned up.

He didn't think it was necessary to tell the suckers that he and McCarthy were in business together; Corbin and the senator split the profits from the sale of the flags.
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A constituent whose name was redacted by the FBI wrote Senator McCarthy a letter in May 1951, expressing his concerns about Corbin's suspected Communist ties: “He entered the U.S. through Canada in the middle Thirties. This, as you know, was the route traveled by many Communists during that period. I have learned that he has had several clashes with the law in some cities along the Lake front.”
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McCarthy referred the letter to the FBI, but then within a matter of hours had it withdrawn. An agent recording McCarthy's abrupt change of heart noted that the senator said “that Corbin was alright and that he did not want the name check, and that he would rather not have any record made that he had requested it.” The FBI had presumably briefed the senator on its intelligence showing that Corbin “had been a Communist Party member since 1939.”
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The bureau had had Corbin under active surveillance for years by this point, and at least several memos went directly to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, meaning that the bureau considered Corbin potentially dangerous to national security.
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Hoover himself had generated memos concerning Corbin.
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Despite all that, McCarthy made his sudden about-face. When asked years later whether Corbin may have threatened or blackmailed McCarthy, Adam Walinsky simply looked at the ceiling and smiled.
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Corbin got out of business with Joe McCarthy when the Red-hunter's reputation began to suffer. “The bottom dropped out of the flag market,” Corbin later obliquely joked in a Wisconsin newspaper.
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In 1954 Corbin was ordered out of Rochester, Minnesota, for running his advertising scam, suspected of hustling dozens of businesses for thousands of dollars. Corbin's operation was exposed when one of his targets was bowling with a union official, who casually told his companion that there were “no advertising cards at the new Union Hall.” The FBI report on this one operation of Corbin's was sixty pages long. Yet, once again, Corbin escaped prosecution.
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I
T IS UNCLEAR PRECISELY
when Paul Corbin and Bobby Kennedy met, though it seems likely that they crossed paths in the early 1950s as a result of their mutual association with Joe McCarthy. RFK worked for McCarthy's Senate Subcommittee on Investigations, probing Communism in the government. The Kennedy family—especially patriarch Joe Kennedy—applauded McCarthy's work. Ambassador Kennedy contributed to McCarthy's Senate campaign. McCarthy dated Kennedy's daughters and attended the wedding of his Senate colleague John Kennedy to Jacqueline Bouvier.

Corbin's relationship with RFK began to flourish in 1960, when they both worked on Jack Kennedy's presidential campaign. Bobby served as his brother's very young but very tough and very capable campaign manager, while Corbin signed up early to help Kennedy out in the Wisconsin primary. At a time when anti-Catholic sentiment ran high in the state, Corbin reported to the FBI that an anonymous caller had asked him, “How much is the pope paying you?” and that another caller had instructed Corbin's wife to tell her “no good husband that the KKK is riding tonight.”
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Later, Corbin inflamed voters in Wisconsin's heavily Catholic districts by distributing anti-Catholic literature that was supposedly being passed out in Protestant precincts. JFK's opponent, Senator Hubert Humphrey, was blamed for the flyers. As far as anybody knew, however, Corbin may have printed up the anti-Catholic flyers himself—and may have invented the anonymous phone calls.
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There was a reason that Kennedy campaign aide Helen Keyes said, “If you have a job and you want to get it done, and you don't care
how
it's done, send Paul Corbin out to do it.”
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While in Wisconsin, Corbin invited his daughter, Darlene, out to visit him at the campaign. He had finally begun to cultivate a relationship with her. He took her to an event with JFK. Kennedy, not knowing she was Corbin's daughter, made a pass at her. “He was flirting with me,” she recalled, “but I wasn't flattered after I heard that he slept with everybody.”
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When Corbin later attempted to introduce his daughter to Senator Kennedy, the candidate blushed.

The Kennedy campaign moved on to West Virginia, and Corbin was put in charge of “Protestant precincts.” Loosely translated, that seems to have meant that he spread cash around the streets for JFK. A later FBI report said that Corbin, while “under the influence of intoxicating liquor” at a party, “stated that he had swung the election in West Virginia for President-elect KENNEDY by passing out $10 bills.”
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According to Walinsky, Corbin got the money from Park Agency, the Kennedy family's business office at 200 Park Avenue in New York.
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Walinsky, an attorney, was once a deputized “bagman” for the family. In 1968, exhausted after days on the road for RFK, Walinsky needed a day off with
his family in New York. Someone with the campaign asked him to stop by the Kennedy offices to pick up a Gladstone bag. Walinsky did and later peeked inside, only to see it was filled with cash—“at least a couple of hundred thousand.” The Kennedy family political machine, Walinsky stressed, ran on “trust.” “Nobody was writing cover your ass memos.” When the Kennedy family passed out cash to trusted aides, no one was asked for receipts. Secrets were kept, and if you kept your mouth shut and did your job, the family took care of you and yours.
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Robert Kennedy was finding that Corbin was one of those men he could trust. Corbin worked hard to impress RFK—so much so, according to at least one FBI informant, that in front of Kennedy he took credit for other people's work.
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Eventually he became a “Bobby Kennedy guy.” John Seigenthaler, one of Corbin's few friends, said years later, “He was very unscrupulous, but he was a good political organizer.”
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Corbin had also become a close friend and adviser to Pat Lucey, Wisconsin's up-and-coming Democratic Party chairman. Lucey would eventually become lieutenant governor and then governor of the state, after a tour of duty in the Kennedy administration, where RFK placed him in charge of all patronage for his home state. It was Lucey who had brought Corbin into the Kennedy campaign in Wisconsin. The two men developed a friendship that lasted a lifetime. Corbin also took Lucey's daughter, Laurie, under his wing. When she was married, Corbin gave her a gift with a note that read, “To Laurie Lucey on the occasion of your first marriage.”
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I
N THE 1960 GENERAL
election, Corbin worked on the Kennedy campaign out of the Hotel Syracuse in upstate New York. No one was impervious to Corbin's taunts. When Pat Moynihan arrived at the headquarters, he walked in dressed as if he'd just arrived from a British boarding school. Corbin took Moynihan's measure and proclaimed, “Well, if it isn't Mr. Chips!”
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Corbin rubbed the local Democrats the wrong way and some tried to have him removed, calling Bobby Kennedy in Washington to complain. RFK “dumped it on me,” remembered Seigenthaler, who was working in the national campaign headquarters. The New Yorkers came to Washington to tell Seigenthaler that Corbin's work for Kennedy was upsetting the entire Democratic slate in New York. Corbin had recently walked into the local Democratic Party headquarters and announced, “On the day after the election, the only people who are going to get jobs in the federal government are working at Citizens for Kennedy.” Seigenthaler could only hold their hands and tell them, “I will do all I can to muzzle him.” But he told them in no uncertain terms that RFK was “not going to move him. He thinks he's doing one hell of a job.”
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On the night of the 1960 election, Corbin was one of the privileged few to be invited to the Kennedy compound in Hyannisport.
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A
FTER
JFK
WON IN
1960, Paul Corbin wanted a job in the new administration. RFK was happy to help out, but one Friday afternoon, the new attorney general called in Seigenthaler, whom he had brought aboard as his principal assistant. Seigenthaler recalled that the outgoing attorney general, William Rogers, left RFK a fountain pen to sign judicial appointments with and “a bottle of aspirin for all the headaches the judicial appointments would give him.”
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On Kennedy's desk was an oversized binder—Corbin's FBI file, complete with an updated background check. Even before Kennedy had become attorney general, he'd asked the FBI to undertake a full field check on Corbin. RFK told Seigenthaler, “I am not going to look at this, but I want you to look at it over the weekend. All Paul wants is a little desk out of the way—Stew Udall will take Corbin at Interior—so he can bill for a federal pension. He can work eight years in Jack's administration.”
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Corbin had told friends that his plan was to work in Washington for sixteen years—eight for President John Kennedy and eight for President Robert Kennedy.

An FBI teletype had gone out to nine field offices, including those in Milwaukee and Minneapolis. They were ordered to comb their files for any and all material on Corbin and to conduct field interviews. The report was to be “personally delivered to Mr. Robert Kennedy.” The request was given top priority and marked “expedited” by the director himself, J. Edgar Hoover.
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When the FBI interviewed Corbin, he of course denied any Communist affiliations and completely whitewashed his background. The agent conducting the interview described Corbin's narrative as “vague.”
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Within days, teletypes clacked with reports from the FBI's field offices, loaded with information on Corbin, virtually all of it shocking.

From the Omaha office came rumors of domestic problems between Corbin and his wife. One source, whose name was redacted, “considers Corbin emotionally unstable, untrustworthy and unreliable.” The memo also went into detail about Corbin's contributions to and membership in the Communist Party USA.
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